by homeworld.redbacknetworks.com with SMTP; 26 Dec 1998 13:20:14 -0000
	by shell17.ba.best.com (8.9.1/8.9.0/best.sh) id FAA01942;
	Sat, 26 Dec 1998 05:17:49 -0800 (PST)
From: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
Message-Id: <199812261317.FAA01942@shell17.ba.best.com>
Subject: Re: Sun jumping on Linux bandwagon
In-Reply-To: <XFMail.981219130600.asmodai@wxs.nl> from Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai at "Dec 19, 98 01:06:00 pm"
To: asmodai@wxs.nl (Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai)
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 05:17:49 -0800 (PST)
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

> Todd, does this have anything to do with Matt's effort? Because I see yer from
> best.com as well ;)

Nope, I am a customer (cf. "toddpw.org"), not an employee, of best.com.

>has the option to ftp sources and try to maintain a cvs repository with cvs and
>sup, with no option to anoncvs. I am now going to try the pkgsrc.tar.gz and see
>how far we can come with that one.

Um, I got going with SUP by cloning /usr/share/examples/supfiles/sup.netbsd.org
and reading the man page. Works fine. I am not tracking pkgsrc or xsrc yet tho.

>update _once_ a week. For serious developers this is too infrequent. The work
>I do requires at least daily updates. The FreeBSD project has multiple hourly
>updates which is even more productive. Imagine starting work on something and
>ye're nearly finished when the next update is made and ye see someone committing

The netbsd SUP server updates itself every night during the wee hours.

This makes me wonder if the web site is out of date:
http://www.netbsd.org/Releases/tracking-current.html


Still, I would prefer to have something better than SUP. I was told at one
point that there is a "remote CVS" server of some kind, which sounds a lot
like what I would expect "anonCVS" to be, but I don't know any details.


As for multiple developers working on the same thing: this happens with PRs
against netbsd-current, although usually the collision is with email-lag on
the current-users mailing list. Right now there seem to be so few people
actually committing code to NetBSD that they all know what the others are
doing, and duplicate changes are avoided by on-line chat communication and
such. Maybe this works great now, but it does not scale.

Ultimately when you have lots of people working on the same thing, you have
to either (a) slow people down a little by making them "claim" a job on a
virtual white board web page of some kind, or (b) accept that duplication is
going to occasionally happen because somebody got to a good set of diffs in
a matter of hours and just sent them in.

If something really takes long enough for you to get mad because somebody
else already did it, then I say you've got time to check a web site and see
if the project is already being worked on, and post something to it claiming
the project 'territory' for yourself.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com